One of the more annoying "features" of the Finder is its habit of keeping all selections within a single folder; files selected in folder 'A' suddenly unselect when you click outside it. This is restrictive if you have a hard disk: typically there's one copy of an application, with files scattered all over the back 40. If you wanted to print a batch of them, from different folders, you were out of luck and had to babysit the Mac all the way thru. What we need is a utility that selects multiple files from a user dialog, then processes or sends the whole lot off to some other program or function. In otherwords, a front man to do a batch job for us! The Front Man is just such a general-purpose document-batching utility.

The Front Man was written to overcome this Finder limitation by providing a general purpose multi-file selector, and to show the use of the _Launch trap from 'C'. While obscurely documented in Inside Mac, there is a lot of potential in this trap! A number of other principals are also shown here, such as user configurability, HFS compatibility, and the use of the finder parameters. Following the guidelines here will teach you how to write HFS programs that work, and explain why some things are still tough to do with an HFS type file structure.

Front Man: List Selection of Files

Choose "Pick" to bring up a standard getfile dialog box. Each time you select a file, it is added to the list to be passed via the finder parameters to another application. Hit the cancel button to quit selecting. An exception is if a file name ends with '.FILE' - in this case, the file is assumed to contain a list of file names (1 per line) which are each added to the finder parms. It can (optionally) display ALL file types, not just TEXT files (so you can batch files to WORD, MacWrite, etc.). The only shortcoming is that when using a file of filenames, it doesn't look up the directory entry for each file named, and get the proper filetype; instead, the filetype of the batch file is applied to each named file (this limits the utility of batch files to TEXT files, but offers "an exercise for the student").

Choose "Launch". If you are in "interactive" mode, a standard getfile dialog box will appear displaying applications. If you are in "hardwired" mode, the application whose name is in a STR resource is launched automatically, with the list of files sent on in your behalf!

Front Man can (optionally) cause the launched application to either print or just open the selected files.

Uses of the Launch and Chain traps

One of the most common arrangements in traditional data processing systems was chained programs. Program 'A' ran to sort or preprocess a bunch of data, then chained to program 'B' which did the reports or other interesting work on the data. This was done to be able to work with large data sets on smallish machines (by today's standards), and also allowed very long processing runs to be broken up into smaller pieces. Programmers also found it more convenient in many respects - the smaller programs were easier to debug and write: all the classical virtues of modularity.

The difference between chaining and launching is small: when you chain to a program on a Mac, the application heap is preserved essentially intact. When you launch another program, the heap is reset except for the desk scrap. ExitToShell, for example, simply launches the program whose name is found in low memory at $2E0. Chaining is thus useful when the different programs want to pass blocks of data in memory, as might be the case in an "integrated" processing package; launching is more useful in more general-purpose "front ends" such as this.

"Front Ends" have a small but useful niche to fill. For example, a "program tuner" might batch a number of 'C' files together, have them all compiled to assembler, optimize at this level, then assemble the tuned files. Also, a set of options (ala conventional 'C' command-line parameters) could be gathered and placed in a block in system memory before launching another application which would know where to look...

Basics of the Finder Parameters

The finder parameters are what make "front ending" an application possible. They consist of 3 pieces of information:

(1) A "message" to the application about what to do with the files. The operation requested is applied to ALL the files named.

(2) A count of how many files to process.

(3) A list of the files to process, with complete location information (volume reference number as well as file name).

Currently, the only messages in use are "print" and "open". Since "message" is a 16-bit field, this leaves 65,766 operations available! There is no reason why "private" message types can't be developed, such as "sort each of these in ascending order", "sort each in descending order", "merge these all together ", etc. as long as the application getting the message is equipped to deal with the additional messages! In an even more flexible system, the first file in the list could contain parameters that dictate what processing is done to each of the following files in the list - that is, another type of command line type facility!! (Hmm, that's not a bad idea - maybe I'll write a general command line front end next....)

I used a set of routines written by Andy Shebanow to access the finder parameters. A couple of minor corrections are noted.

One minor fact to note if you intend to start building your own finder parameters: the finder-info relocatable block is locked on entry to your program and must be unlocked before you can start manipulating it!

Configurability

It is usually desirable to allow a program to be configured by its user. If the usage will change frequently, menu choices are probably the best route; if usage will be stable once settled on, it's less obtrusive to configure the program by using ResEd to set values in STR or STR# resources. Here, we've gone the ResEd route, using STR resources to determine the programs behavior in a simple fashion.

STR #259 determines if only 'TEXT' files are to be displayed (if it contains the string TEXT) or if all types are to be shown (if not ).

STR #258 determines if the launched application should print the files (if it contains the string PRINT) or just open them (if not).

STR #257 determines if the program is in "interactive" mode (if it contains the string ASK) or in "hardwired" mode (if not).

STR #256 contains the name of the application to launch in "hardwired" mode; this should be a complete path name.

Yer gonna love the Munger

This is one of the most useful - and overlooked - little routines in the entire Toolbox! The documentation is hidden in the Toolbox Utilities chapter at the end of volume I of Inside Macintosh. It allows searching for substrings, string insertion, string replacement, and string deletion: all with a single chunk of code! The table if fig. 3 summarizes how the munger is used; see IM for the details...

Here, we use it to check STR resources for specific substrings to decide how the program is going to behave. Just checking to see if a STR contains a given substring is more tolerant than requiring an exact match. The STR is "folded" to uppercase (lowercase would work equally well) before the match so the test is case insensitive. The only minor point to remember in 'C' is that any non-negative result is a success - a common shortcut is to simple check for non-zero for success.

The tiny routine CheckStr reads in a STR resource, folds it to uppercase, and tries to locate a given substring; the output from the Munger is returned as the result.

HFS Compatibility

This really isn't terribly difficult if you follow the rules. The failure of most development system publishers to be HFS compatible is totally unreasonable!

As has been documented countless times by now, the new file system is a fairly conventional tree-structured directory system. Each directory can be considered to be very much like an entire volume, with a link to the directory above it in the tree. Since each directory is almost independent, you must have the problem of potentially identical file names, and therefore you must specify a volume or directory as part of the file name. To avoid this would require unique names for all files in the system, which is ludicrous (try keeping unique names on ALL YOUR FLOPPIES, which is logically equivalent!).

This has been known for decades, since the first disks came into use. The concept of a "working directory" is part and parcel of Unix: either you are referencing your working directory, or you have to give a complete path to find a file, starting at the device level.

As a shortcut, "search paths" were developed, such as the new Consulair path manager - for a given type of file, the system is given a set of partial path names, which are prefixed to the plain file name to come up with a complete path name (which is still needed). Each partial path name is prefixed to the plain file name in turn until the system either finds the file or quits in disgust.

The basics are simple: either give a complete path name or make sure the system knows which volume/directory you are referring to. For appl- ications, this means using SetVol to set the default volume; with files, the volume reference number field must be filled in correctly.

In The Front Man, both the application to launch and the files to process can be located anywhere. The SetVol parameters for the application are taken from the SFGetFile record in interactive mode, or a full pathname must be provided in the STR resource (a full pathname for anything has highest priority in searching). A similar approach is used in setting the volume reference number for the finder parameters.

Unfortunately for developers, there is no fundamental mechanism built into the HFS type of system that allows you to automatically know where certain files "ought" to be located. In the Unix-type world, there is usually none either, except that applications conventionally all reside in a directory called "cmds" or something similar (a solution which is unusually awkward with the Mac interface for obvious reasons). Applications can make use of a path manager-type system if they wish, but that's still not part of the system. The closest we could come would be to build a path-manager facility into the ROMs and have individual applications provide "search path" resources customized to their needs. Total consistency would not be achieved, since different search paths would and could be created, but it might be a small step forward. And remember, with search paths, if you frequently restructure your folders, you'd have to restructure all your search paths at the same time!

Now that we've explained once again how easy HFS compatibility is for the average application, the development system vendors look even worse! Minor glitches aren't terribly surprising, but for the authors of Xenix (one of the best-selling Unix clones on the market), for example, to have an HFS-incompatible Fortran system on the market 6 months after the Mac+ was released and far longer after they knew what was required (since they probably had a hand in setting the specs) can only be explained by a corporate disregard for the Macintosh world (Microsoft didn't write Fortran themselves). Their conventional applications don't have quite as many problems, but still can't be called 100% compatible. Bah! Humbug!

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